Wednesday, November 29, 2006

MathML support in Konqueror and Java?

Christoph Steinbeck used ASCIIMathML to extend HTML Slidy (see previous blog), to embed mathematical equations in his slides.

And it works like a charm... in a MathML supporting web browser like Firefox. The trick that ASCIIMathML uses, is that it converts a LaTeX-like syntax to MathML and let the browser handle that. Actually, the website mentions a true LaTeX syntax to MathML version too.

Konqueror?

Now, Konqueror does not support MathML (yet), and, therefore, cannot be used. The Konqueror website does not even mention MathML, though there were rumours about MathML in KHTML quite some time ago. Alfredo Beaumont implemented better MathML support in KFormula during this summer's Google Summer of Code. Is anyone actually embedding that into KHTML?

JGecko?

Roman Kennke is a Classpath developer and is currently doing an excellent job extending it with HTML rendering support. Are there opensource Java MathML renderers at all? And what are the chances seeing that embedded in the free Java HTML renderers? That is, can I expect JGecko to support MathML any soon?

4 comments:

Anonymous said...

libmathml?

Anonymous said...

The biggest problem with MathML is that once you start to study it and get to know it better, you realise how horrible and useless it is, and loose the will to implement it.

Unknown said...

I answer very late, but I've just read this blog and the comment about "horrible and useless".
I agree! MathML is terrible to write by hand (and I know what I'm talking about for having written small physics article using it).
But at the present time, is there any alternative for web publishing?? I don't like images: cannot be scaled contrary to text, cannot be copied and modified easily, hard to maintain.

MathML is the best hope for a COMMON, STANDARD way of publishing mathematics content on the web.

Anonymous said...

Yes, I agree. MathML is the only standard to write mathematics for the web. Mathml is supported by the W3C, so this would be pretty logical to keep it as web standard for mathematics.

But, it's true, mathml is not easy for hand-typing, but designed for the web and data storing. The weight is lesser than using images for display maths formula, and responding for web search-engine. Mathml is designed to be typed by a dedicated editor, that's the way to write math on the web with mathml.

unfortunately, mathml is fully supported only by gecko-browser. That's a bit frustrating for a Web-standard